The person
James Baxter has to thank for saving this gem from oblivion is a Wellington
lecturer. Such a paradox would not have been lost on a poet who spent his life
at war with the powers of this world and who made his own rough peace with
them, when he could. Baxter wrote much scurrilous verse about universities
while relying on their patronage. He bent Catholic dogma inside out while
running a commune with church blessing. He attacked bourgeois mores in book
after book, depending on that same bourgeoisie for sales. Yeats was a distinct
early influence and Baxter would have known that ‘we make out of the quarrel
with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.’ Baxter’s
wife, the poet Jacqueline Sturm, probably got closest in her poem ‘Coming
Home’: ‘That tormented paradoxical man / Father of my children / Convinced me
we belonged together / But then moved on.’

That the
poet owns to being some one who blundered is just one of his irritating,
seductive traits. Baxter was a man who made a public stance of his strengths
and weaknesses. Bill Manhire’s early impression was of ‘an enchanter figure’
who ‘lived and played the part.’ This self-mythologisation is an inheritance
that New Zealanders continue to wrestle with. Do we want it or don’t we? What
does it say about us that this is our voice? Only this year yet another
dramatic theatre piece about the man toured the country, an amalgam of readings
and music, entitled simply Baxter. This certainty/uncertainty about his
place in the national life may explain the silence that has surrounded him over
the past twenty years and may be good reason for having an essential text for
teaching purposes to help new readers find ready access. If nothing else, this New
Selected (James K. Baxter. New Selected Poems Edited by Paul Millar
OUP, A$36.95 NZ$42.95, 294 pp, 0 19 558429 5) satisfies that need, one not so
well-served by the mammoth Collected Poems of 1980.

Arranged in
two sections that might loosely be headed canonical and extra-canonical, this
selection delineates maturity and mastery. Early indebtedness to MacNeice and
Dylan Thomas (‘To wave and bird I open wide / The bible of my rimrock days, /
To salt-grey ngaio boughs that cross / The forehead of the west’) is superseded
by a linguistic richness and strength drawing on English sources from all periods.
More important still is the felicitous detail (often enough, happily
infelicitous) that can only be explained as pure Baxter. Take ‘Wellington’, for
example, from 1962:

Otherwise
than I had supposed it - ‘A grey town’, they said;

But I found
instead a grid of coffee bars

On which
the young, my friends, bake bread

Out of
invisible stones. The hills too are young,

Bush
triangles in their groins. But the old notice a black noose hung

Between
monotonous pavements and the inexplicable stars.

Like others
caught up in the confession mania of the Sixties, much of Baxter’s meaning
depends on biography. For those who came in late the editor supplies a useful
plot outline, but after that it gets hairy. The poetry expresses the progress:
mother nature’s son, heroic boozer, womanising Jeremiah, barefoot holy man. By
the time of the great journal cycles, e.g. ‘Pig Island Letters’ and ‘Jerusalem
Sonnets’, Baxter has not only perfected the forms till they are seamless, he
has moved beyond their strictures. Not imitation but transformation. The fire
in the belly takes precedence over style wars. This is the acid test for
readers of Baxter, this mass of original cycles, by turns profound and
controlled, indulgent and sloppy. The one weakness with the selection is the break-up
of the cycles, leaving the novice with insufficient clue to their direction or
true magnitude. The republication of ‘Autumn Testament’ (OUP, 1997) is a good
sign that could be repeated with other of his long poems.

A problem
for Baxter is that he is surrounded by the egregious language of superlatives:
‘foremost’, ‘major’, ‘unparalleled’. Superlatives do not help us to explain the
amazing amount of overindulgence, as well as rambling flatness, in his work.
Hearing the voice is one of our best aids to picking emphases and in some
Baxter one feels that only the man and the occasion made these words cohere.
The poetry is infamously various in style and standard, though even the bad has
the allure that comes from an original position expressed fairly and
passionately.

Neither do
superlatives assist someone to reach a poet whose credal statements include,
‘...I was a New Zealander / And therefore Man Alone.’ Especially at the end of
his short life, Baxter’s central subjects of poverty and humility are compromised
by such big talk, especially considering his evident belief that the virtues
could be exemplified through the poetry. Baxter’s expectations were very
different from his eulogists; he constantly twists away from any received idea
about his role. Also, this established image of the non-conformist actually
distracts us from much important questions about how New Zealand produced such
a literary figure. What do we make of Baxter’s identification with the
prophetic tradition of Te Whiti? And with the pacifism of his own parents? What
kind of Catholicism did he preach? And was it more than identification with yet
another minority culture within New Zealand? How much calculation was there in
his different martyr positions? How many audiences was he addressing? Baxter is
anything but ‘Man Alone’ and his motivations for the sake of his people carry
more weight than critical boosts. His poetry continues to open up these and
other questions.

A final,
very good, reason for having some Baxter at home becomes apparent when reading
the recent spate of New Zealand anthologies. Baxter is obviously responsible
for many of the changes in New Zealand poetry since his death in 1972. The
charmed New Zealand confidence with the conversational mode, for example, is
deeply indebted to Baxter’s experiments with cadence and natural voice. His
adventures with Maori-Pakeha macaronics, not all equally successful mind you,
are a sound basis for much bicultural literature that has followed. And more
than any other poet, it is Baxter who showed the next generation how to let it
all hang out. His social and political ballads, of which there are a
preponderance here, are the undoubted forerunner of today’s performance poetry.
Very entertaining, packed with the bizarre and indecent. Both as an
introduction and as a set text for students, this selection brings us close up
to a mercurial poetry written by a tribal fringe dweller who, nevertheless,
symbolises awkward, if not at times plain nasty, truths about New Zealand and
our own consumer culture.